My initial reaction to Sabotage: How the Republican Party Crippled America’s Economic Recovery was an incredulous, “Jeez, will anyone really get snookered into blaming the Republicans for that at this point in affairs?” And then yesterday happened, and we all realized we’d probably have to vote for Obama again, because the conservatives will always be better at the whole “nihilism” thing than liberals. This book is a useful source of the talking points Democratic Party operatives will repeat so relentlessly between now and November they might actually succeed in dissuading any self-respecting leftist who can still afford cable from voting at all.

The recent retraversal by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of their Watergate reportage is a welcome, albeit flawed, corrective to the decades of efforts by Nixon and his cheerleaders to rewrite history.